Ottawa

Good day everyone! Jon and I had a good day. We walked to the Parliament Hill to get a tour of the Parliament Building. We got tour tickets for 2 hours later. So we walked around Sparks Street Pedestrian Mall. Many of the stores were closed today. The stores that we went to were mainly souvenir stores. We went to this very interesting store that sold lots of aboriginal art and crafts.

At the end of the mall strip, there is the Currency Museum of the Bank of Canada. It opened at 1pm so we waited till then. It was quite overwhelming to see the history of currency from different nations. Some things I learned were that the word “dollar” was derived from a Dutch word, hong kong made the smallest denomination of money ever minted in history, and the reason why you see holes in the middle of some coins are so that you can carry it. There used to be a really large coin made of limestone. People would only be able to carry it by sticking a rod through the hole. It was quite interesting. I wish we had more time there but you see so many coins that they all start looking the same. I thought it was funny that in the past, some European countries took coins from spain and would break up the coin to form smaller bits or counterstamp the coin with their emblem so you may see the English monarch on top of a Spanish monarch.

Afterwards, we went to the Parliament building for our tour. We had to go through a security check before entering. The building has lots of intricate details. It was such a pretty sight. We went to the house of commons room, senate room and the library. The library survived a fire because the doors were made of iron. Also, the painting of Queen Victoria survived 3 fires so far.

After the tour, we took the elevator to the top of Peace Tower which overlooks the city. The elevator ride showed us the different bells in the tower. On the weekdays, there is a person that plays the bells in the afternoon.

We then walked around Parliament Hill and took pictures of Lester Pearson, Sir John A Macdonald, the peace tower and the centennial flame.

Afterwards, we walked to Rideau Canal and saw the Rideau locks. We even saw a boat trying to pass through the locks. It’s quite interesting. There are several gates that stop water from flowing. The amount of water in between each gate varies. When a boat comes, they fill the water in the first gate to the same height as the second gate then opens the gate to let the boat go through. Subsequently, they will then fill the second gate to the same height as the third gate, etc. It was quite neat.

We then walked to Byward Market which is a farmer’s market. They had lots of produce stands as well as maple syrup stands. In that area, there are also many restaurants and shops. We bought an apple strudel from a bakery. It was not bad. Then we bought a butter, garlic and cheese beaver tail at Beavertails. It sounded good when we bought it. We didn’t want to have 2 sweet things in a row but after eating it, our tummy were not feeling good. We walked around a bit more then decided to head back to our accommodations.

On our way back, we walked by Hi Ottawa Hostel which also used to be a county jail. Jon thought it didn’t look like a jail from the outside but it did have iron bars over the windows. We returned to our accommodations and decided to wash our clothes. To do so, you have to put a minimum of $10 into a smartcard to recharge the card. Jon and I only wanted to do $3.50 worth of laundry. So the person at the desk let us find old smartcards to make enough for $3.50. How nice! We now have clean clothes for the next few days.

While we were waiting for our laundry and our tummies to settle, we watched more Anne of Green Gables. It’s very addicting.

At 8:20pm, we decided to drive to Chinatown to get Chinese food. At Parliament Hill, they have this light show called Mosaika which start at 9:30pm. So we didn’t have much time to eat. We order Yang Chow Fried Rice and Shanghai Noodles to go. We arrived at Parliament Hill with 30 minutes to spare but because the weather was so mucky, they cancelled the show.

We drove back to our accommodations and watched Mosaika on Youtube. It looks really good. We were upset that we missed it. However, our sadness was appeased when we watched Anne of Green Gables. We managed to finish the second miniseries, “the sequel”. It was very good and it ended well. We’re not going to watch “the continuing story” because it’s loosely based off the book and it only got about 6 stars out of 10 on imdb.

We’ll be heading to Sault Ste. Marie tomorrow so we’ll sleep early. Good night y’all!